AKIRA

Well, Well, Well…You must be here for one of two reasons.

1. You are about to travel and you need to know how not to blow all your savings on your upcoming trip.
2. You aren’t going on a trip yet but you are dying to get out and explore. You probably lack the funds just like a college student, but still want to make your travel dream happen.

Am I right? Yes, of course I am. Now, there are a couple of things you need to decide first.

• Where do you want to go? International or Domestic (Pretty important).
• Are you going alone or with others.
• What is your max budget?
• What is your time frame?

In order to successfully plan a good trip, you need to first determine where. You could go off randomly and book a flight to a random place out of sheer riskiness, but you might want to research that place first. Reasons being you don’t know what the political climate is and you don’t know anything about this place besides hashtags on Instagram.

Now, Let’s say you want to travel domestic. There a couple ways to travel for really CHEAP and have FUN. A couple ways to travel include bus, car, train, and plane. If you aren’t in a rush, take the bus. One that I am particularly fond of is the MEGABUS. It’s a big blue bus with a pig on the front. I have found tickets as low as five dollars on there. There is a seven dollar tax to purchase tickets, but its still really cheap. The bus goes all over the U.S, but trips are limited depending on where you are coming from. You could also try the greyhound, but it is more expensive. The benefit that comes with it is that you can pretty much go anywhere in the U.S. You can go from coast to coast unlike the Megabus where you would have to go on one coast only and then transfer to another bus (basically a hassle).

BOOM! So now you have the bus route for traveling, but what about air if you can’t bare to sit on a bus for 28 hours, well there’s other options. I personally think if you are going cross country, air is the way to go because you get there way faster and its better If you’re on limited time. You don’t want to spend a whole day on a bus and let that cut into your vacation time, but never the less, here are some flight tips.

1. Spirit: If you find a ticket online, you can go to the airport and they will take off about 40 dollars of the ticket price.
2. Frontier
3. American Airlines

These are the top three cheapest from the U.S. Best advice is to buy your tickets six-eight weeks before your flight. (Avoid Sundays: Most expensive). Buy Tuesday and Wednesday, but fly Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. Also, you may find a really good deal by booking one way on one airline and another one way on a different airline. When flying, you have a 24 hour refund. Another tip is clearing you’re history,cookies, or just private mode to get cheaper deals. Most websites track your history and will increase the prices because they know you are looking for a flight, CLEAR THE COOKIES. It will save you some money seriously.

Next mode of transportation is AMTRAK. I personally have never taken Amtrak, but I have heard it is nice to ride on. On Amtrak, if you packed heavy it will benefit you a lot because they allow two carry-ons and two luggage bags. This is better opposed to airlines because they typically allow one free carry on and usually charge for every bag after that which can begin to rack up in price.

International vacations can be a bit hard to travel. A good idea would be using Groupon. I know that there are a lot of scams out there, but I have heard a lot of good things about vacations through Groupon, just READ THE REVIEWS. 

Also, if you’re flying then you should fly off-season. Another option is using a travel credit card that offers flying miles. A lot of credit cards will give you the benefit of giving you airline credit when you use their card.

Now let’s do some budgeting and planning.

Your budget is important, know you’re max budget. Let’s say it’s 3,000 for an international flight. You want to shop, sleep at a nice hotel, sight see, and get around. If you decide to use Groupon, you can get a round trip ticket for 6 nights and a hotel room for as low as 600 dollars per person. That covers your airfare and sleep. Now you have to deal with sightseeing. There’s different modes of transportation like taxis, rentals, buses. Whichever you prefer is entirely dependent on how much you can spend. If you are trying to save money you might be able to get a deal on rental cars and it will probably come out more cost effective depending on how long you are in town and how much you want to do. If we ballpark, we will just say its going to cost 700 dollars including gas. Now you are out of 1400 dollars give or take taxes. You are now left with 1400 dollars. If you’re doing a 6 day vacation, you will clearly need food and its always good to try new things, so you will probably end up spending about 500 dollars in that 6 day period, assuming you eat three times a day and each meal equals to 30 USD. You are now down to 900 dollars. The rest of it can now be used to sightsee and do anything you really choose. A lot of things that are available in other countries are free, like viewing the Eiffel Tower or visiting a beach.

Another thing you might want to keep in mind is that other countries currency differs from USD. Europe’s money is worth more than American, so you may go with 1000, but its only worth about 700 over there. If you were go to Jamaica, your same 1000 may be worth 1300.

These are just a few tips that will help you with a trip, but I will add more information as I do more research on the subject.

                                                  “The world is your oyster.”